RABBI JONATHAN SACKS BLOG
June 24, 2015

…we are facing a phenomenon that the West has not known since the wars of religion in the 16th and 17th century. When they ended in one place, they began in another, and they lasted for more than a century. The same factors present then are present now. [1] Discontent with an existing power widely conceived to have been corrupt: then the Catholic Church, today secular nationalist regimes. [2] Protest taking a religious form, an attempt to get back to the pristine purity of the faith as it was in the beginning. And [3] a revolution in information technology, which allowed what would otherwise have been marginal disaffected groups to outflank all existing structures of power. Then the revolution was printing, today, YouTube, Facebook, and the other social media, whose most accomplished users are ISIS. READ MORE